We've had our last lunar eclipse in the US for a fair spell.  Seems to me that the past couple of years blessed us with a fair number of them, and now it looks like we are going into a bit of a drought for a while.

Anyone else get some photos of this morning's lunar eclipse?

Most people say the moon is easy to photograph, but I disagree with that.  Maybe for a photo of the illuminated surface, and a final image that's devoid of context, lacking what the human eye saw in that moment, yes, this can be achieved with f/16 and 1/ISO seconds, maybe f/8, 1/ISO when shooting film negative or positive, but this generally renders everything else you are seeing into shadows of indistinguishable blacks, if anything at all.

For a single exposure moon photo, I think there's a real art to firing the shutter at precisely the right moment, the most ephemeral of moments, something I would liken to blue-hour Milky Way photos.

I was out from, I don't know when, to sunrise this morning.  I didn't have my watch and my cell phone was just tucked into a pocket of my backpack, so I had no idea when these photos were taken, because the EXIF on my camera is set to who-knows-what-at times.  While I was out taking photos, someone asked me what time it was, and I had no idea.  Read that last sentence again, and warm your soul with the irony of what I'm about to post from this morning's work...



Yeah, I had no idea what time it was when I was doing these photos.  None.  Seriously.  I just kept moving backwards and to the south for each new framing.  At one time, I had my tripod set up on the double yellow line of the roadway, my dog milling around at my feet, or in some nearby bushes, or scrounging around in the park looking for leftovers from Sunday evening's event.  Dawn kind of caught me by surprise.  With all of the lighting in the town square, the normal tells of twilight weren't there.  That was all at my back.

Some other recent lunar eclipse stuff...

15 May 2022


19 Nov 2021


21 Jan 2019

And from a couple nights earlier.  We had walked out of a local beer house after closing and were looking up at how close the moon and Jupiter were, and I made a mental note to grab my camera for the following evening, a mental note I had kind of forgotten about until I was driving home from dinner, and just happened to see the moon while at a traffic light a couple blocks from home.  I was just a couple minutes late from being able to capture the fading blue of the twilight sky, but was still able to get a decent composite image for what was in front of me.  Alabama humidity will do this to the sky.

Regrettably, Jupiter is somewhat dominated by green/magenta chromatic aberration, and it kind of makes the cloud pattern appear to be oriented in the wrong direction.  Still rather happy with this preliminary image, especially since I had just walked into the house to grab my camera rig.

these are all great!   I have never managed decent photos of the moon ... like ever lol

These are absolutely beautiful! It was overcast for me and I was so disappointed. This brightens my day!  Thank you for sharing!

I come from a family who loves to watch eclipses. When I was a child, we would take vacations to see solar eclipses. I’m super stoked about the total solar April 8, 2024 bc it will be total in my hometown.

My plan was to use the 200-500 to get tele shots and set up the D7100 with the 24-120 at 24 with the intervalometer set to 5 minutes to get the whole sequence.

The 500 mm shots were not what I hoped, I need to redo the dot tune on that lens.

And I set up the sequence around 9 pm, and brought the camera back to the house. Went back out a 3 am to start the sequence, in the moon-lit darkness.

And forgot to remove the lens cap. FUCK….

Oh well…

Umbra just starting to cover the moon

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Umbral Plus 0 by FredMan, on Flickr

12 minutes after eclipse start

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Umbral Plus 12 by FredMan, on Flickr

24 minutes after eclipse start

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Umbral Plus 24 by FredMan, on Flickr

48 minutes after eclipse start

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Umbral Plus 48 by FredMan, on Flickr

1 minute before totality

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Totality -1 by FredMan, on Flickr

Moment of totality

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Totality +0 by FredMan, on Flickr

24 minutes into totality. Finally got my settings figured out, but decided to leave this one uncropped.

Lunar Eclipse 2022-11-08 Totality +24 by FredMan, on Flickr

From last night.  Two frames, one for the exposure of the moon and Mars.  A second frame from an overexposure to better capture some of the diffraction I could see in the high clouds.

It's a photo by happenstance.  I was out on the sidewalk talking with my neighbors and went back into get the camera.



Something is going on with the lens/camera.  I'm simply not getting the sharpness I could see in the image preview on the back of the camera.

I came so close to trying for that shot myself; but we had high clouds and it would have looked like crap.

Should be pretty similar tonight; maybe I'll try.

I've never really had a chance to post tight Moon photos, because I've always lacked longer glass.  Most anything where I've had the Moon, it's largely been "environmental" framing ... a rather aspirational euphemism for running around with too-short lenses.

That might change.  I'm now trying to work out some ephemeris stuff to see if I might be able to get some telephoto shots of a person on the scale of the Moon up on Mt Washington in the coming months.  This new-to-me lens (an 80-400mm) seems like it can do it, and it's "just" a matter of timing, clear-ish skies, temperature/wind conditions, and lugging this beast and a DSLR up a WI3 or WI2 ice climb to gain the shoulder / Alpine Garden up on Washington (NH), and having a climbing partner/model with infinite patience.

With respect to "environmental" framing, here are some crescent moon photos that look anything but ...
[I have stopped-down photos of these scenes, but I've been wholly unable to come away with an edit that's passable for what I saw while I was there, so I'm content with the blown-out highlights]


And one where I really was able to capture the crescent, owing to some forest fire smoke down in South Carolina ...
[most people never notice the Moon in this photo, even when I tell them it's there.  35mm f/1.4 lens]

Some sort of recent stuff from the 80-400...

Weather and timing of this, that and the other didn't really work out for lunar photos on this trip.





I was hoping for a shot at something like this, but it the clouds didn't start to clear until the moon was a higher than what I could get into position for.
[fake photo is fake, very fake]

I was able to get some detail with the surface of the sun.  This was the first time I'd ever taken any solar photos, and was happy with the way they turned out.

ICE ND100000 16 stop ND filter with an 80-400mm lens.

Oct 14th...

From last night ...

3 frame composite:
- lunar crescent and Jupiter
- earthshine and stars / Jovian moons
- foreground focus (exposure in between the two above, but much closer to the longer earthshine exposure)

To get this framing, my tripod was set up on the double yellow line in the road.